The Roomba's autonomous cleaning routines changed vacuuming forever since it could be just left to run and eventually would clean almost every inch of your home. But its pseudo-random approach takes a while to be effective, so Sharp's new Cocorobo line lets you map out a room and plan a custom route for more efficient cleaning.

And you don't even need to be home to do it. An accompanying smartphone app lets you remotely start and stop the vacuum, as well as create tiny floormaps of your home so you can explicitly tell the bot where to go. Sharp has also made the latest model of the Cocorobo a little smaller, so it can squeeze into more spaces in your home, but come December you'll pay dearly for all those advancements with a $900 price tag. The Roomba doesn't look so dumb any more, does it?